Race the Sands

by Sarah Beth Durst

  I can do this, she told herself. She was experienced. She was wise. She was shrewd. She was . . . never going to find what she needed for two hundred gold pieces. Really, this was a hopeless task.

  Shalla . . .

  Squaring her shoulders, Tamra plunged into the auction.

  Cage after cage lined the street, some of them stacked three or four tall, each with a kehok raging inside. A few slept, clearly drugged into complacency, but most were left alert to show off their strength and presumable speed.

  The auction was far more chaotic than the word implied—there was no auctioneer or orderly presentation of beasts, like at one of the farm auctions. Instead, everyone was buying and selling all at once, deals made beneath the screams of the monsters. With the start of the races only a few weeks away, it was especially busy. The sellers scooted between the cages, shouting the statistics for each of their creatures: height, weight, age, number of races run, number of races won. You wanted fast and strong, with a will that could be bent without breaking.

  The stronger the kehok, the harder to control, but the greater the payoff if the rider was skilled enough. It was a balance—what you thought you could train versus what would kill you.

  Tamra skipped over the kehoks who had already proven themselves in races. Those would be automatically out of her price range. She let the other trainers haggle over them. She also skipped the ones whose sellers promised obedience. Those were fine for students, lousy for winners. She needed a kehok with fire in its soul.

  A seller grabbed her arm. “I know who you are and what you want.” His breath was rancid, stinking of overripe fish, and his fingers were as greasy as a sausage.

  “I want your hand off of me,” Tamra said, yanking back hard enough that the seller stumbled. He recovered quickly and launched into his sales pitch, but Tamra was already walking on.

  She ignored the whispers around her and the swirl of gossip. The seller hadn’t been the only one to recognize her, clearly. But it didn’t matter what he or anyone said—she knew she wasn’t going to buy from the likes of him. So eager to sell, he’d tell any lie about his kehoks.

  She was on the lookout for a particular kind of seller. One that didn’t want to be at the auction. One that didn’t care about the sale as much as the hunt. One just like . . . him. Tamra set her sights on an overmuscled man with three cages behind him. He wasn’t calling out to any of the shoppers. In fact, his arms were crossed over his beefy chest, and he was glaring at the potential customers as if daring them to come closer.

  This was the kind of man who saw the kehoks as prizes to be won. The kind who trapped the most terrifying monsters he could find without any regard to their tractability. He didn’t care if anyone bought his kehoks for a decent price. He just cared that everyone admired the fact that he’d caught such vicious brutes. Presumably by himself, bare-handed, with his eyes shut and while hopping on one foot.

  Coming closer, she eyed his prizes: three vicious bruisers. One was slick with slime, dripping from its jaws and the ripples in its thick, scarred skin. Another was a two-legged beast that wore skin covered in spikes from its neck down to a deadly-looking tail that terminated in a ball of flesh with spikes as long as Tamra’s arm. The third was a massive lion. It was sheathed in black scales instead of tawny fur, its mane looked as if it were made from black metal, and its tail was split into three muscular whips.

  “Which one’s your strongest?” she asked.

  He pointed to the third, the metallic-black lion. “Killed a man.”

  “While you were hunting him?” So, not by himself. And probably not while hopping on one foot either.

  “Yesterday, at the market.”

  She didn’t want a known killer. Once they had a taste for human death, more often than not it became their sole obsession. You couldn’t race a beast that cared only about death. The desire to cause death was too closely linked to the desire to feel it. Dismissing the black lion, Tamra moved on to the spiked kehok. “Has this one been tested with a saddle?”

  “No.”

  Not exactly practical for racing. She wasn’t certain how a saddle would fit between the spikes. The hunter had clearly caught this one just for the fun of it.

  As she stepped forward for a closer look at its back full of spikes, the two-legged kehok swung its macelike tail at the cage bars. CRACK. It hit hard, but the bars held. Expecting it, Tamra didn’t flinch.

  Behind her, she heard the gasps of other shoppers.

  She ignored them and moved on to the kehok that oozed with its own goo. She wasn’t bothered by the thick layer of slime, though she thought it would take a special kind of rider to sit in that filth every day for hours at a time. It wouldn’t matter, though, if the beast could win. You can get used to anything if it’ll bring you what you want.

  She suppressed a grin, imagining what the augurs would say about that sentiment. You were supposed to always seek to better yourself, but they probably never thought that meant subjecting yourself to daily goo.

  Walking around the cage, Tamra examined each of its limbs. “Uneven legs,” she noted. One hind leg had bunches of muscles, while the other seemed to be shriveled.

  The seller grunted. She couldn’t tell if that was agreement or an objection, or if he was just grunting at the heat or the stench or a hundred other things.

  “This one didn’t outrun you,” she guessed.

  “Caught up to it quickly. Problem was caging it. See the ooze? Burns to the touch.”

  “You’re going to have trouble selling that one.”

  He shrugged. “All of them are trouble. Be slaughtering them after the auction. Hunt them down again in their new bodies. Might fetch better prices next time around. Plus it’s how I test myself against them. I win if I re-catch them.”

  “You know odds are they won’t remember you, right?” Except in rare cases, you couldn’t remember your past lives. Restoring your memory of your past life usually required extensive exposure to your old home and family. Most never got that chance. It was a circle: you couldn’t remember who you’d been, so you didn’t return to where you’d remember, so you couldn’t remember . . . and so on. This was part of why the augurs were so necessary—they could read both your past and future for you, and tell you whether you were on the right route or not. In the case of kehoks, who’d forfeited all rights to improving their fate, that amnesia was most likely a blessing.

  Another shrug. “I remember. And the augurs back me up, when the market recordkeepers use them to do their tallies. Caught that one”—he nodded to the spiked kehok—“fifteen times.”

  She didn’t want a kehok who could be caught so easily. Or one that would burn its rider. Reluctantly, she returned to the first kehok, the black-scaled lion. “And this one?”

  “Augur hasn’t been by to read it yet. Most of them have been reassigned to help the guards keep things calm, you know? Can’t afford to have the market shut down. But I don’t need any augur to tell me about this monster. First time catching it. It’s got so I can tell—this is this one’s first spin as a kehok. Might be why it’s so full of rage. It took me three days to track it down, and the clever thing turned the tables on me—I would’ve been food for its stomach if I hadn’t carried Ebzer.” He patted the sword at his hilt.

  Cute. He names his blades.

  “How much?” she asked.

  His eyes widened. “You don’t want to buy him.”

  “I might.” She crossed her arms. “Depends on the price.”

  “Told you he killed a man when we were moving him in here. Gored him trying to escape. He’ll gore you too, given half the chance.”

  She said nothing, but continued to study the kehok. He was one of the strongest kehoks she’d ever seen, with leg muscles that looked as if they could kick down a tree in one blow. He’d be fast. Very fast. And it made a difference that he’d killed in an escape attempt, not purely out of a desire for violence—there was a chance he hadn’t yet acquired a love of death.
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br />   He was watching her with golden eyes that held a hint of intelligence.

  Intelligent kehoks could win races.

  “Killed a man, you said?”

  The seller nodded vigorously. “He has the heart of a killer. Must have been a murderer in his last life.” Most of the lion-shaped kehoks had a predatory history, so Tamra wasn’t surprised to hear that.

  “He won’t kill or gore me,” Tamra said, pinning the kehok with her gaze. “I won’t give him the chance.” You might be strong, she said with her eyes, but I’m stronger. “One hundred gold pieces.”

  “Nuh-uh, a kehok this size? Least one thousand.”

  Tamra snorted. Seriously? He was trying to bargain with her, after first trying to talk her out of it? Looking at the seller, she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He was saying it because he thought he should be saying it. A hunter, not a businessman. He needed to partner with someone if he wanted to make any money. But it wasn’t her job to tell him how to do his. “A killer kehok that no one has proven can be controlled? A kehok you plan to kill at sunset anyway? Anything I give you is more than he’s worth. One hundred fifty, plus you throw in the cage.” She’d need the cage to bring him home. She doubted she’d be able to control him on a crowded riverboat, not with zero time to train him.

  “Can’t figure out if you’re stupid or crazy to want him at all.”

  Neither, she thought. I’m desperate. “I know what I want. And I get it.”

  That was a lie, but it was one she told herself daily. It made her feel as if her fate were more in her hands, rather than subject to the whims of those more powerful than she was and their rigid laws and traditions, and taxes, fines, and fees.

  “Meet me at two hundred, and he’s yours.”

  “One hundred seventy-five and the cage.” She needed some left over to tempt a rider, though there was no rider with any level of experience who would be enticed by that low a starter fee. She could be stuck with a rider who was no more skilled than her paying students. And look how well that had turned out.

  The seller spat on his hand and held it out.

  She shook it and handed over Lady Evara’s tokens.

  She turned to the kehok. “You’re mine,” she told him.

  He bared his lion teeth, each one as deadly as a knife. She understood him as clearly as if he’d spoken: Then I am your death.

  “Your need to kill me is not greater than my need to use you,” Tamra informed the kehok.

  She thought she saw him flinch, but she must have imagined it. Kehoks were smart, but she didn’t think he could have understood that.

  Bargaining again with the seller, she arranged for him to transport the kehok to the riverboat docks. That required a bit more of Lady Evara’s gold. Securing passage for her patron’s newest purchase would require more. And she still needed a rider—one who had the strength of will to tame a creature as wild as this one. But Tamra felt more hopeful than she had in days.

  Maybe I’ve found my miracle.

  Or my death.

  Either way, things were going to change.

  Chapter 4

  Hidden behind a stack of crates, Raia watched the trainer bargain for the killer kehok. She didn’t need to hide to stay unnoticed—she wasn’t the type of person whom anyone noticed, especially in a market. She was seventeen years old, old enough to be in Gea Market without parents but not old enough to be taken seriously as a buyer. Ordinary height, with a pretty but unmemorable face, nice enough skin, her black hair styled in multiple braids that were only just beginning to unravel. She’d picked clothes that were clean and simple—clothes that said both “I’m not worth kidnapping” and “Of course I didn’t run away from my family and my future.” But she hid out of habit anyway.

  It was something she’d gotten far too good at lately.

  Like stealing fruit.

  A grapefruit weighed down one of her pockets, tugging at her tunic as well as her conscience. Raia knew what her former teachers would say about theft, but, she reminded herself yet again, they weren’t here, and her stomach was. She’d have time to balance out the harm she’d done to her soul after she did what she came here to do, which was to find a new future for herself.

  And also find someplace not completely terrifying to sleep tonight, she thought.

  Last night she’d bedded down in a toolshed behind an overcrowded house outside Gea Market. She’d woken every few minutes, convinced every creak and crack in the night was someone coming out to the shed in search of a trowel for a bit of late-night, can’t-wait-until-morning gardening. She hadn’t been caught. But she certainly hadn’t slept well.

  At dawn, when the market opened, she’d screwed up her courage and started approaching trainers. All morning, she’d tried. All morning, she’d failed. One look at her—her unmuscled arms and her uncalloused palms—and they’d turned away. She couldn’t blame them. With all the uncertainty in Becar these days, no one wanted to take any kind of risk. The continued lack of an emperor was putting everyone on edge. But this trainer felt different.

  Tamra Verlas.

  Raia knew who she was, of course. Everyone did. She recognized the tattoo and the scar, even the way she walked.

  The cursed trainer.

  Last flood season, Trainer Verlas had made a mistake in one of the final races—given bad advice or . . . the rumors hadn’t been clear on what exactly she’d done. Only that it was her fault that her rider and his kehok had died, as well as several other riders and even a few bystanders. It had been such a dramatic disaster that it was said she’d never sponsor a winner again. She’d been reduced to training the children of the wealthy, for their amusement, in one of the many low-end training facilities.

  Yet here she was, at the market, clearly buying a racer.

  Talk to her, Raia encouraged herself.

  If Trainer Verlas needed a new racer, maybe she needed a new rider.

  And if that’s the case, maybe she’ll be desperate enough to pick me.

  Studying the trainer, though, Raia didn’t think that was likely to happen. She didn’t look like the kind to make decisions out of desperation.

  Well, then maybe I’m desperate enough to make her pick me.

  Cursed or not, this woman had trained a rider who’d nearly won the Becaran Races. Her racing style was said to have been unique, and her training style supposedly matched that. Unique enough to train a newbie? All Raia needed to do was win a few races. Not the whole thing. The prize money from just a few wins, even a string of minor races, should be enough . . .

  But how to impress Tamra Verlas, when she’d never impressed anyone in her life? Especially not someone as impressive as the trainer.

  Raia watched as Trainer Verlas approached the killer kehok with no fear. Her face, which Raia could see in profile, was placid. Her arms hung by her sides, muscles loose. She didn’t look prepared to defend herself or jump out of the way. If the kehok attacked . . . Even from within his cage, he could do some damage.

  Raia couldn’t hope to ever look that fearless. She felt full of fear every second of every day, so much fear that sometimes she thought she’d choke on it. She felt fear right now, for Trainer Verlas.

  The kehok bared his lion teeth, each tooth the size of Raia’s hand, and she felt prickles walk all over her skin. Why am I even considering this? This is crazy! She didn’t know anything about racing, and she’d never even met anyone who’d ridden one of the monsters. There had to be another way to come up with enough gold to appease her family.

  Except there wasn’t. Not quickly. And not with her lack of any kind of useful skills.

  She knew what was said: Anyone can become a rider. And what was also said: But only those who don’t fear death dare try.

  Raia did fear death, of course.

  I just fear other things more.

  She heard the trainer say to the kehok, “Your need to kill me is not greater than my need to use you.” It wasn’t said as a threat—Raia knew very well what those so
unded like—and it wasn’t a boast either. Trainer Verlas spoke as if she were stating a fact.

  And Raia knew what she had to do.

  I have to prove my need.

  Taking a deep breath, she slunk out of her hiding place. No one noticed her. No one even glanced at her. She crossed the stream of people flowing in both directions past the cages. Her legs shook as if they were made of custard, but she didn’t stop. She walked past the seller and Trainer Verlas. She kept her eyes fixed on the golden eyes of the black lion—the one everyone was calling the killer kehok.

  He watched her like a cat watches his prey.

  Alert. Amused. Hungry.

  She felt her heart thump faster and harder, as if it wanted to burst out of her rib cage. It was beating so hard it nearly hurt. Her palms were sweating, and she knew she must look as terrified as she felt.

  But it didn’t matter what she felt. Because she had to do this. It was her best chance at freedom from her family and from a life she didn’t want. And she wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip away, no matter how scared she felt, no matter how bad an idea it was. Because it was her only idea.

  Raia halted in front of the cage. Behind her, she dimly heard the seller barking at her to get back, it wasn’t safe. She ignored him. She ignored all the buzzing and chatter, the cries and the thumps and the screams from the other cages. She focused only on the kehok.

  “You won’t kill me,” she said softly, “because you need me as much as I need you.”

  She expected him to try to maul her. She was tense, ready to run—unlike Trainer Verlas—and she couldn’t pretend to be otherwise. If the kehok swiped at her with those massive knife-sharp claws, she’d be a fool not to try to avoid its attack.